The purpose of advertising is to influence people into changing/enforcing behavior. In order to produce maximum effect using minimum resources promoters aim to tailor the message to the target audience and to target message delivery to the appropriate audience.
Additionally, a form of advertising called “viral” or word-of-mouth has become increasingly popular in recent years. The core concept is to “seed” the advertised message with a select group of the target audiences and have the message spread by word-of-mouth.
In parallel, the concept of formalizing, modeling and utilizing social networks has become popular in the Internet industry. Numerous examples exist: MySpace, LinkedIn, epinions, Amazon's friends & recommendations and others. Additionally, a large amount of academic work has been published relating to the modeling of trust relationship within a social network, on context-sensitive trust, on deriving the trust relations from communication patterns, etc.
The prior art includes a Method And System to Utilize a User Network Within a Network-Based Commerce Platform, U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/968,197, to Mengerink, et al filed Oct. 18, 2004. The application discloses a method and a system to utilize a user network within a network-based commerce platform. For example, the method includes identifying a target group including at least one other user of the network-based commerce system based on at least one group association rule, the at least one group association rule being selected by a first user, communicating transaction information to the identified target group, and facilitating the transaction between at least one target user of the identified target group and the first user, wherein the first user and the identified target group have an existing relationship.
In U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/000,707 to Tseng, et al, filed Nov. 30 2004, titled: “Enhancing Virally-Marketed Facilities”, disclose a method and apparatus for enhancing a virally marketed facility. In one embodiment, the invention is a method of operating a virally marketed facility. The method includes measuring virality of the facility based on a conversion rate and a propagation rate. The method also includes determining potential options for increasing virality. The method further includes executing potential options for increasing virality. In an alternate embodiment, the invention is a method of operating a virally marketed facility. The method includes measuring virality of the facility. Also, the method includes determining potential options for increasing virality. Further, the method includes concurrently executing potential options for increasing virality.
The existence of social networks is well known, allowing for ranking of more and less influential individuals, etc. However, the use of a social network for more focused delivery of advertising based on the opportunities available with the advent of the Internet remains undeveloped.